The Void: Part 1
Image by ChatGPT
My uncle Walt told me something was off when he drove by the three-car pileup over on Murgatroid Road. One lady had her seat belt on and the airbag dust hung in the air like a chemical fart. Her internal organs had been scrambled on impact, her face bouncing off the airbag like you or I's head hitting the pillow after a long day and a ten story fall. It was hard to tell if she was in any way luckier than the kid who hit her (I say kid because Walt said he was wearing Vans, but no one really knew because his head had swollen up to the size of a watermelon). He'd been thrown through his front windshield and landed a quarter mile down the road. If there was an Olympics for these sorts of brutal endings, he sounded like a gold medalist. "The guy just cranked his wheel directly into oncoming traffic," said Walt. "No warning whatsoever. I'd say that's weird." Sniff. I blew my nose. How the hell could you know what someone was thinking if they weren't there to explain? I think I'm getting sick.
That was the first of a spate of head-on collisions that inspired a few podcasts and an article in the NY Times. A few years back at this preppy, private school in Los Angeles, they'd called a meeting of the PTA because four kids had offed themselves that semester alone. One hanged, two OD'd, and another by blood expulsion by way of the wrists. Gurgle. Gurgle. You might call incidents like that a social contagion kind of thing, but no parent wants to believe that if their kid's friends jumped off a bridge, they would too. Anyway, being trendy is a hell of an explanation for why people started cranking their steering wheel into oncoming traffic, but that was the explanation, at least for a little while.
On September 12th, a man named Larry Bold, a four-hundred-pound father of two cats, opened the sliding door of his fourteenth-floor apartment and squeezed out. He looked down at the view of 34th Street where it met the Westside Highway. I could just jump, he thought to himself. And then he decided that I want to jump, and was going to jump. The only reason anyone knows this is because he lived to tell about it because he couldn't lift his gargantuan stomach fat rolls over the railing. He wrote about it in his journal, and a week later he ate every single prescription pill in his kitchen, because he could and wanted to. There were a lot more nimble Larrys out there who did have better luck with the jump, three actually – Larry Gross, Lawrence Vader, and Larry Cruickshank. They were among the 3,721 suicides by autokabalesis in the month of September alone. It wasn't until August of the following year that they had any clue as to why. I share all this because, one, it's interesting to me, and two, I suspect in the end this will be a cautionary tale about how you can’t make life easier.
